There is a religious doctrine of Young Earth Creationism (YEC), whereby some people believe that the Bible says that the earth was literally created about 6,000 years ago. I am not arguing that that doctrine is necessarily false. I am arguing that if it is true, then when God created the earth he put in place a vast amount of evidence that the earth is many millions of years old. Moreover, the evidence is well coordinated, in that diverse evidence points to a consistent time line for events in the earth’s history. The evidence cannot be explained by scientists having made just a few key mistakes.

Debate Issues

When YEC is debated, the subject is often narrowed to a few specific pieces of evidence. I believe that approach to the debate is ineffective, because even if Creationist arguments are soundly defeated the impression is that perhaps only a few mistakes in science have led to the idea of an old earth. Thus, if perhaps only a half dozen pages in a scientific text were modified, then YEC would fall into line with all the other facts. That impression is note remotely the case. If YEC is correct, than barely a single page of a standard geology text would remain standing.

Here I present the “Long Argument.” It attempts to paint the larger picture of a good sample of reasons we know the earth is old. I offer it as a template for others who would like to debate the subject.

I believe everything I have claimed with respect to geology is referenced in standard texts like Prof. John J. Renton’s “Planet Earth,” and also in his college-level geology course on DVD, The Nature of Earth. The TalkOrigins Archive provides discussion and references for many of the subjects.

Twenty Reasons

The scientific evidence that the earth is old includes:

1. The formation of sandstone. Sandstone starts with sand. The process to get sand-sized grains from disintegrating granite takes millions of years, and there is no other process. There is no way to transport the very large quantities of sand required in less than millions of years. Sand only moves when there is active rushing water, not deep under water. The grains must be fused into sandstone in millions of years under high pressure.

A natural process derives sand from granite by chemical weathering, a process taking hundreds of millions of years. If a few days of rushing water can carve the Grand Canyon, we should see new canyons forming all the time. Erosion is really a million times slower than that. The sequence is volcanoes > granite > sand > sandstone > upheaval > erosion > Grand Canyon. That cannot all happen in a few days.

2. The formation of limestone. Limestone is composed of calcium carbonate. The only source for that is the skeletons of sea creatures, mainly tiny diatoms. To get that many takes millions of years. Fusion of the particles into stone take millions of years under high pressure.

Florida, for example, is made almost entirely of limestone. Some suppose that dead animals washed away in a few days for the skeletons to create Florida. There could not possibly have been enough animals for that. If the limestone was created with the creation of the earth, then God created evidence it was old.

3. The formation of caves in limestone by carbonic solution. Limestone caves are not created by erosion. They are made my water seeping into tiny cracks. The picks up CO2 and is very slightly acid, so it slowly dissolves the rock over millions of years.

Limestone caves could not originally have been created by mechanical erosion, because that would require a tunnel through which water carrying abrasive sediment is rushing. Limestone has only tiny cracks when formed, and the water seeps in very slowly, typically the advance is about a foot per year. Slow moving water cannot carry sand to they is no possibility of erosion. Limestone caves are today only formed by chemical action, so supposing a completely different method acting only in the past affirms the resolution.

4. The formation of stalactites and stalagmites in caves, by evaporative deposition. Stalactites could not have been formed by erosion. they are deposited by very slow evaporation of dripping water. The calcium concentration in the water is limited by the solubility of the calcium, which is very low. Therefore there is no time at which it could have been high enough for rapid formation of stalactites. The caves had to be first formed when the limestone was below the water table, then they had to be drained before stalactites could begin forming.

5. The slow erosion of sandstone by stream flooding. The Grand Canyon, for example, is thousands of feet deep. It took 4.5 million years to erode the sandstone with a continuously flowing river. There is no mechanism for it to happen in 40 days. The sequence again: volcanism makes granite that erodes to sand that is carried to the ocean, then sandstone is formed, the sandstone is raised up, and a canyon is eroded. Explain how all that happens in 40 days. Note that there is virtually no erosion under water. Why can’t we take a fire hose and cut a 5000 foot slice through sandstone in a few days today?

6. Slow erosion by the freeze-thaw cycle. We can observe now how fast the freeze-thaw cycle breaks large large rocks into small ones. It takes millions of years to get what we have.

7. The slow weathering of hard minerals like granite. Granite is really hard. It weathers at the rate of an inch every 100,000 years. Observed weathering could be from a flood. Not all erosion is from the freeze/thaw cycle. Efflorescence is another method, one that works in deserts. Chemical weathering decomposes granite. However, there is no known mechanism that breaks down rocks with anywhere near the speed of the freeze/thaw cycle, and we know even that is very slow.

Obviously the weathering of granite could not be from a flood. Water at high velocity has no effect on granite, because the material is so hard. Blast a fire hose on a chunk of granite for a month (or a year or a century) you will get wet granite, but no erosion whatsoever. Granite is a mixture of minerals formed by volcanic action. Chemicals in the air erode some of the minerals in granite, which ultimately frees the nearly-impervious quartz crystals. A flood would block the air, actually slowing the disintegration. The quartz crystals are then sand, which is why it takes hundreds of millions of years to form sand.

8. The mineralization of petrified wood. Wood is held in place by being quickly buried in mud. Lack of air keeps in from rotting. The mineralization process takes millions of years. there is no peer-reviewed scientific reference as to how wood can be mineralized quickly. You assert it is possible within the realm of current science. Keep in mind that the organic material is completely replaced by rock.

9. The sculpting of mountains and valleys by glaciation, missing in the tropics. If flooding caused the effects equivalent to those of glaciation, we would see the effects in tropics, which we don’t. Mountains nearer the poles show more effects than those below the latitudes where glaciers reached in the ice ages. Besides, floods have very little effect on granite.

There is virtually no erosion by undersea currents, because the currents very rarely travel fast enough to pick up abrasive material. Currents are only produced by flooding near a river mouth, but in a great flood, as supposed, the world would soon be covered in water ending erosion. There are characteristics of glacial erosion, like the angular shapes of the Matterhorn and Grand Tetons that cannot be produced by moving water erosion. Also, very large masses of material are moved by glaciers that cannot be moved by water.

10. Slow erosion by efflorescence, a process that flakes off the surface of rocks in desert areas. “As groundwater evaporation [through the rocks] continues just below the surface and more salts precipitate, the growth pressure exerted by the crystals causes cracks to form parallel to the surface.” (Renton, op cit)

Water carrying dissolved minerals seeps very slowly through rocks. Near the surface of the rock, if the atmosphere is dry, the water evaporates and the dissolved minerals form crystals. As the crystals grow they exert pressure on the rock. Eventually the rock surface flakes off parallel to the surface. Since this is most important in deserts, the flakes are not sweep away by water and tend to pile up as talus at the base of the rock. This is a very slow process that is stopped by water. The amount of erosion by efflorescence shows that the earth is old.

11. Sedimentation in layers in which less-dense and more dense materials alternate. If you shake up some stuff in water, the light stuff goes to the top. That’s not what we see in sediment layers. The layers include very light materials like pollen and, in estuaries, fish scales in layers with heavier materials. The types of pollen and fish scales in a particular layer indicate both the season and the climate when the layer was formed, providing a climate record back more than 30,000 years. A flood would not disperse spring pollen in separate layers from winter pollens, repeating over many thousands of layers.

Shaking up sediments and hitting them helps sorts by density, so it does not explain how pollen grains could be sorted in layers by season. The claim that there is no consistent order in sediments is false. Fully-ordered sediment cores have been found in lake beds at more than two dozens locations around the earth, confirming that the earth is much older than 6,000 years.

12. The formation of ice cores showing several hundred thousand seasonal cycles. the ice cores are from Antarctica and Northern Greenland, where there has never been any thawing at all. The variations come from seasonal precipitation patterns. Moreover, the trapped CO2 cross-checks accurately with radiocarbon dating.

Creationists make unsupported assertions that Antarctica has variable seasons. Carbon dating does not depend upon the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. It does depend upon variations in cosmic radiation, but that’s less than a 10% uncertainty that’s been calibrated. Even uncalibrated, it correlates well.

13. The building of volcanic islands. Volcanic activity does not work nearly quickly enough to create islands in less than a very long time. The lava is too viscous to flow quickly. A new Hawaiian island is building and is fairly near the ocean surface, but still will not emerge for 30,000 years. The erosion of sandstone in the Grand Canyon took 4.5 million years by moving abrasive-loaded water; the Hawaiian Islands are isolated basalt.

14. Continental drift evidenced by matching coasts and mineral characteristics. Continental drift carries once-contiguous deposits of sandstone far apart. Volcanism does not create sandstone. Moreover, volcanism cannot move whole continents around quickly. The contents are still moving at about an inch per year. That tracks with the motion of the Hawaiian Islands over 65 million years, with the oldest islands have weathered the most.

If the water came out of the ground, then that was clearly divine intervention as there is no physical law that accounts for that. Also ordinary water has no where near enough energy to move a continent. Note also that the continents have drifted apart and then back together many times. One flood, even a miraculous one, could not do that. Standard texts, such as referenced, explain continents having joined and separated multiple times.

15. The rise of mountains by continental subduction. Rock doesn’t float, so water cannot raise mountains. Tectonic activity can only work slowly because in is driven by convection currents in extremely viscous magma.

16. The plastic folding of the earth’s crust shown in rock layers. Material like rock can indeed be folded without breaking, due to properties of plasticity. Basically, if it is bent slowly enough while under pressure it doesn’t crack. Folds are often observed in sedimentary rock, which was never heated after formation. Continental drift depends upon an underlying plastic layer upon which the continents “float” — but only very, very slowly.

17. The decay of radioactive materials, including, for example, Argon39/Argon40 that does not depend upon knowing the original amount of an isotope. About twenty independent isotopes pairs having different half-lives support a common time line.

A natural nuclear reactor in Africa has been used to establish that radioactive decay rates have been constant for billions of years. Nothing affects rates of radioactive decay: not melting, not chemical reaction, not vaporization. http://en.wikipedia.org… If something did affect decay rates it would have to speed up some isotopes by a factor of a million, on down to others by a factor of ten, and each in such a way that the dates each produced still agreed with each other. there are some theories that decay rates might be changing with the expansion of the universe, by an amount too small to detect. If so, that wouldn’t provide the large factors needed, and it would be the same for all isotopes, not the widely differing factors needed.

The half-life of uranium is 700 million years, that of carbon 6,000 years. To get the uranium measurements of 13.7 billion years down to 6000 years, uranium must have decayed over a million times faster than now observed. But to get carbon measurements of 45,000 years down to 6000, it had to have decayed less than ten times faster. There are a couple dozen isotopes with intermediate half lives. But the dates of objects as measured with different isotopes cross check, so each must have sped up at a different rate.

18. The rings indicating the seasonal growth of coral. Coral grows with seasonal variations. The seasons are determined by the orbit of the earth, not weather. In some sense summer and winter differ only by weather, but in modern times, nothing shorter than a seasonal variation affects coral growth. It is cross-checked with isotope dating.

18. The many reversals of the earth’s magnetic fields as captured in lava flows. The magnetic field reversals occurred at significantly different times, captured in different lava flows. One period of mass volcanism would show the same magnetic field in all lava flows.

Based upon the study of lava flows of basalt throughout the world, it has been proposed that the Earth’s magnetic field reverses at intervals, ranging from tens of thousands to many millions of years, with an average interval of approximately 250,000 years. The last such event, called the Brunhes-Matuyama reversal, is theorized to have occurred some 780,000 years ago. Wikipedia

The strength of the magnetic field varies over a wide range between reversals. In the past couple of hundred years it seems to be exponentially decaying, but that is only a recent part of the seemingly random long-term fluctuations.

20. The visibility of light from stars that are more than 6,000 light years distant. The distance to stars is most readily determined by simple geometry. The angle to the star is measured in one season, then six months later when the earth is one the other side of its orbit. That gives the distance to many stars proving an old earth. Another method, for distant stars, uses standard candles Red shift is not a primary method. like Type 1a supernovas. The brightness of the star is determined by its observed physical properties, and then the distance by the apparent brightness.

If the speed of light has been measured using astronomical objects far from earth, so we know it is not different away from earth. If it were, that would be an inexplicable violation of special relativity and we would consequently lose most of modern physics. General relativity says that light is affected by gravity, but the effect is far too small to detect with earth’s gravity. It is observed by light being deflected by stars. Gravity affects the direction, not the speed.

Flood Explanations

Currently there is only enough water on earth to account for a flood 200 feet higher than current sea level. If the flood eroded the tops of 15,000 mountains, then something inexplicable added an enormous amount of water, then removed it. Moreover, there is no process by which 40 days of water could do anything measurable to granite, or even sandstone. One could blast a fire hose on granite for 40 days, or 40 years for that matter, and nothing would happen beyond it getting wet. Granite weathers mainly due to chemical attack from the atmosphere on the non-quartz components, a slow process.

Keep in mind that if each of the 20 items cited is the result of some error, then the next thing to explain is why all the errors are consistent. Sediment layers agree with isotope dating and so forth.

There are many more, but this establishes the point. It’s conceivable that scientists could have made mistakes in believing that one or two pieces of evidence imply an old earth, but the amount of evidence is so substantial that it is not conceivable that mistakes were made in every case. Moreover, one time line is consistent with all the evidence, so it would not just be having made dozens of mistakes, but having the errors consistently support a common time line.